Uber Freight’s app for truck drivers is getting an upgrade

Uber Freight, the newly spun out Uber business unit, will push out an upgraded app in the coming weeks with better, more intuitive tools to help truck drivers connect with shipping companies.

The redesigned and updated app comes just two months after Uber announced it would make Uber Freight a separate unit and more than double its investment into the business.

“This is an industry that is just fraught with a lot of manual processes,” Adam Schwabe, senior product designer at Uber Freight told TechCrunch. “A lot of work that has to go into running the business is the overhead. The way we approached this is to design an app in a very user-centered way around the truck drivers.”

That meant going to a lot of truck shows and getting the app into drivers’ hands, Schwabe added.

The result is an upgraded app with new navigation features that make searching for and filtering loads easier to customize and more intuitive. The new redesign has a search bar across the top of the screen, an easy place where all of the driver’s preferences can be found. If drivers change their selections — say putting a preference on maximizing the rate per mile — the search bar will update in real time about how many load matches are found.